The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
Methods and systems are used in driver assistance systems for motor vehicles in order to monitor the peripheral environment of a motor vehicle and/or to support or to supplement additional systems, such as so-called lane-departure warning systems or other driver assistance systems.
A disadvantage of the known methods and systems is the complexity of synchronizing the plurality of sensor modules that are necessary for reliable operation of this kind of radar system, particularly so that the plurality of sensor modules do not interfere with each other during their operation.
Synchronization is typically achieved with dedicated synchronization lines, which require an undesirable expense for material and assembly due to the corresponding cabling, thereby increasing the overall cost of the radar system.
Synchronization may also be achieved with an existing data bus for networking the individual sensor modules, wherein the data bus is used to transmit the signals necessary for synchronization. This solution has the disadvantage that the latency periods of most bus systems are too long to allow precise synchronization. Furthermore, in these kinds of systems, the bus load increases accordingly because of the transmitted synchronization information, so that at times, other communication via the data bus might only be possible to a limited extent.